🚀 go-pugleaf

charltn@ccu.umanitoba.ca (Jim Charlton) writes:

>In <1992Dec30.000429.24047@panix.com> schuster@panix.com (Michael Schuster) writes:

>>I'd often wondered about the magnetic safety of mailing diskettes.
>>Wondered how many diskettes that arrived unreadable were really
>>due to exposure to magnetic fields during transit.

>>Today in my mailbox was a post card from Pizza Hut. Taped to it was
>>a magnetic sticker, suitable for posting on your refrigerator door,
>>with the phone number of my local store.

>>Good thing no software publisher was mass-mailing update diskettes
>>this week, eh?

>I also wondered how susceptible disks were to magnetic fields.  So I
>took a disk, half filled with files, and exposed it to the field of a
>strong horseshoe magnet (3 1/2" diskette).  While I could easily pick
>the disk up by its metal gate I could not in any way corrupt the data
>on the disk!  I suspect that data is much less vulnerable to static
>magnetic fields than is commonly thought.  Alternating current
>electromagnets/transformers etc. may be much more damaging but I conducted
>no tests with alternating fields.
>   jim...
>charltn@ccu.umanitoba.ca

I took a bunch of old 360k floppies and put them in the middle of
a 12" monitor degaussing coil. After 10 seconds of degaussing, I tried
three of the diskettes and could still read their directories no problem.
I didn't try to read any files, though.

Andrew